The 4 Most Essential plugins for Nopcommerce Website Developers in 2021

Recently I found myself in a group chat with a few other Nopcommerce professionals that turned into a debate about the best plugins for a Nopcommerce website in 2021. While obviously we didn’t agree on everything, we did find a few that we all generally use on a regular basis to make our lives easier and our clients’ websites better.

So without further ado, here’s the list of plugins for Nopcommerce that I would recommend to all beginner and professional Nopcommerce developers out there…

Nop HTML Widgets

This widget is designed for people who want to be able to make changes to their ecommerce site but have little to no coding knowledge, or do possess it and would rather do things the quick and easy way!

With this plugin you can design the widgets and decide where they will be placed on a page and which pages it will appear on based on conditions such as product, special offers, user attributes, and what day/time the visitor loads the page (think time limited offers).

Nop One Page Checkout

Some people complain that one page checkout for nopcommerce isn’t customizable enough, and they aren’t wrong in regards to it’s lack of ability to edit the experience, but I would forgo fine tuning the minor details for a major increase in conversion rates any day of the week. Removing obstacles and effort is key to conversion optimization in ecommerce and that’s exactly what a one-page checkout experience does.

It basically combines the cart and the checkout pages to turn 6 steps into 1! Now put yourself in the shoes of a site visitor. I am sure you have had enough experience online to witness a streamlined sales process yourself... What reason would you have for not wanting that on your own website?!

Nop Smart SEO

“Search Engine Optimization”, now that’s of those buzzwordy sounding topics where most people know what the desired result is (get shown high up in search engine results) but no idea how to get there. Unfortunately, ecommerce SEO is harder and more time consuming than for other types of sites simply because of the sheer amount of products, and hence pages, that an ecommerce site generally has to optimize for.

Going through all the product pages individually could take a lifetime in some cases! This is why a plugin like Nop Smart SEO is the only way to go when you build a Nopcommerce website. You set the templates for the meta-data tags that the search engines look for and the plugin will apply this to the whole site or specific categories, manufacturers or even individual product pages of your choosing. You can even have different meta-data for different languages and dominate search results all over the planet!

Shipping Director

Shipping costs are one of those things that can become almost algorithmic to work out and an absolute disaster if you get it wrong. Between edge cases and more common complications, it can get... well… complicated, which is why using a plugin that lets you use your own conditional logic to set rates is more or less essential for most people marketing and selling shipped products online.

If you are having issues with certain shipping scenarios then there’s a 99.9% chance you need a plugin like Nopcommerce Shipping Director to fix it.

What do you think?

So these are the plugins that I use all the time to stop me pulling my long luscious locks out of my head in contempt, instead gliding through a project with more time to spend on other aspects of the build... or just less time building in general.

So tell me in the comments, do you agree with this list? Are there any plugins that I have missed or are there any on here that you don’t think are worthy of such esteem? Let us know.